Jenna Lyons, the Woman Who Dresses America

IT’S hard to miss Jenna Lyons. About nine feet tall and slim as a mink, often eccentrically dressed and wearing the boxy, geek-chic eyewear that has become the most identifiable signature in fashion since Anna Wintour’s bob, the 44-year-old executive creative director of J. Crew was an instantly recognizable presence at the many parties, runway shows and red carpet events she attended during 2012.

There she was at the Costume Institute gala in May, dressed in a blue-collarish denim jacket with a formal duchesse silk skirt in Schiaparelli pink. There she was during Fashion Week, dancing away at the Alexander Wang after-party, her shirt unbuttoned down to the Netherlands. There she was at the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund dinner in early November, in a matching silver paisley top and pants reminiscent of 1950s men’s pajamas, huddled for much of the evening with Seth Meyers of “Saturday Night Live.” And there she was on Nov. 12 on the stage of Carnegie Hall, where, along with notables like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the architect Zaha Hadid and five Olympic gold-winning athletes, she was named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year.

As she stood on stage in a man’s tuxedo shirt, form-fitting black pants and emerald-and-diamond chandelier earrings from Bulgari, grasping the unwieldy award that had been presented to her by Lauren Hutton, Ms. Lyons spoke movingly of her long path from storklike teenager to fashion swan. “I know what it’s like not to feel beautiful,” she told the audience, which included hundreds of young girls invited by the magazine. “I remember that feeling.”

There was another moment of significance in the speech, at least for those in the fashion world who had been buzzing about Ms. Lyons’s private life for the last year: when she made eye contact with an attractive young woman sitting about a dozen rows from the stage and thanked, along with her young son and her boss, “Courtney, who has shown me new love.”

Like Jodie Foster’s coming-out (sort of) speech at the Golden Globes last Sunday, Ms. Lyons’s acceptance speech was a public acknowledgment of her relationship with Courtney Crangi, the sister and business partner of the jeweler Philip Crangi, and the woman whom she starting dating after separating from her husband of nine years, the artist Vincent Mazeau. The couple’s breakup at the end of 2011 and the subsequent romance had been avidly covered by The New York Post, People magazine and hordes of fashion bloggers, but Ms. Lyons had stayed mum on the subject until that night.

Scrutiny on a gossip site is rarely welcome, but there is no denying that Ms. Lyons’s growing celebrity has been good for her and J. Crew, whether she is quoted in the press when Michelle Obama appears at a public event dressed in J. Crew, or she is lending her face and style to the hugely popular “Jenna’s Picks” feature in the J. Crew catalog and on its Web site. From time to time, the company has even winked at her growing status as a style icon, as when, at the fall presentation, a long line of models were decked out in those signature eyeglasses, or when the catalog showed Ms. Lyons painting her son’s toenails hot pink.

But with fame came a level of intrusiveness, and paparazzi interest that Ms. Lyons was not prepared for. Page Six exhaustively covered the breakup with her husband and the emotionally fraught sale of their Park Slope town house (which sold in February to Vincent Martin of Depeche Mode for $4 million). A Fox News commentator pronounced the toenail-painting no less than “an attack on masculinity.” “It may be fun and games now, Jenna,” Keith Ablow wrote on the Fox Web site, “but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid — and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your ‘innocent’ pleasure.” (On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart mocked the hullabaloo with a segment he called “Toemageddon.”)

Ms. Lyons concedes that she is not immune to the joys that fame has brought her. “Do I like the attention?” she said over drinks at Locanda Verde, around the corner from the TriBeCa loft where she lives with her 6-year-old son, Beckett. “Well, of course the narcissist in me will say ‘Yes.’ In all honesty, there is nothing more sweet and moving than when someone comes up to me and says: ‘You’re Jenna Lyons, aren’t you? I love J. Crew.’ That is so nice. I love that. It is amazing.”

But, as with the Page Six dissection of her love life, not all publicity is welcome publicity.

“It has been challenging this past year,” she said dryly. “I’ve been sort of shocked with the level of interest in my personal life.” Traveling under the radar of the paparazzi, it seems, is increasingly not an option.

“I keep my sunglasses on,” she said. “Too bad I’m six feet tall.”

Millard S. Drexler, J. Crew’s chief executive and Ms. Lyons’s mentor at the company (“She is, in my opinion, one of the most talented, trained, intuitive and commercial designers I have ever met”), sees something of an upside to the challenges Ms. Lyons has had to face.

“She went through this public period that was, let’s call it, maybe slightly scandalous,” he said. “And I think that made her, in a perverse way, very appealing, because who in the world doesn’t deal with issues? I saw her grow dramatically from having suffered that adversity — grow in her own confidence, in her own appeal. And it wasn’t like she hired a bunch of public relations people to cover anything over. She handled it with a great amount of dignity.”

DECEMBER was the 22nd anniversary of Jenna Lyons’s arrival at J. Crew — she has spent exactly half her life there. She started as an assistant designer in men’s wear, fresh out of Parsons, and over the next two decades worked her way to the top. Now, as the company’s president, she oversees every visible part of the company, from the clothes themselves to the look of the stores, the catalogs and the Web site. One might call her today’s answer to Tom Ford, who almost two decades ago undertook the reinvention of another swamped brand, Gucci.

Ms. Lyons is like Tom Ford in many ways: articulate, intelligent, charismatic, controlling and very talented. But she is also the anti-Tom Ford. Mr. Ford, a former model, courted fame with a cool, almost macho sense of self-assurance. By contrast, Ms. Lyons is down-to-earth, approachable and almost comically self-effacing. And whereas Mr. Ford was fastidious about his public image, from his uniform of a dark, unbuttoned dress shirt and flat-front trousers to the angle from which he could be photographed, Ms. Lyons is surprisingly unconcerned about how she is seen and depicted. She takes chances with different looks (though almost everything she wears is from J. Crew). She has fun getting dressed. She makes mistakes and laughs at herself.

“Jenna is remarkably astute and intelligent, and she’s open about herself,” said Mark Holgate, the fashion news director of Vogue, who used to live in the garden apartment of Ms. Lyons’s Park Slope town house and who has worked with her on the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. (He also introduced her to Ms. Crangi.) “Nothing ever feels forced or contrived or rehearsed with her,” he said. “There’s a kind of vulnerability and unguardedness that is rare in that level of designer.”

That is no overstatement. Ms. Lyons does indeed come across as her unvarnished self, whether she is squealing with delight over a sparkly bit of jewelry or crisply reeling off the elements, ideas and merits of a new collection in a business meeting.

When it is suggested that she could be described as equal parts fashion insider and outsider, she scoffed.

“I am totally an outsider,” she said. “I am so not an insider, and that is O.K. I might feel like one in very particular moments. But I don’t feel the same pressure I did when I was young to be part of the club. I’m not one of the cool kids, and that is totally fine.”

THAT sensibility springs from sensitivity. Ms. Lyons grew up in Palos Verdes, Calif., on the coast south of Los Angeles. She was not Malibu Barbie. Her awkward height was compounded by a genetic disorder, incontinentia pigmenti, that scarred her skin and caused her hair to fall out in patches and her teeth to be malformed. (She has worn dentures ever since, she freely pointed out.)

Then, in her seventh grade home economics class, she learned how to sew, and sew she did. It worked better than she could have hoped. The popular girls liked what she made. Style gave her not only armor; it gave her cachet.

Though some people might be eager to leave such ugly-duckling baggage in the past, Ms. Lyons was able to integrate the experience into her look, her work and the philosophy behind J. Crew itself.

“It is not like you have to prescribe to a certain identity or idea to be a part of the brand,” she said, adding that one of the things she and Mr. Drexler bonded over early on was that they didn’t want to see any visible logos on any of the clothes. “I think that has more integrity than something that makes you feel like if you don’t look a certain way, you cannot be part of it. I don’t appreciate that. I grew up not feeling like part of the group, and I hate that feeling and hate making anyone feel that way.”

Ms. Lyons may dismiss the idea of herself as a fashion insider, but she has been selected as one of the 10 judges voting on the winners of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, along with Anna Wintour and Diane von Furstenberg, and she was recently named to the CFDA board of directors, signaling the opening of a once-closed door.

“That shows how much the CFDA has changed,” said Steven Kolb, the chief executive of the council. “Twenty years ago, the CFDA was focused so narrowly on ready-to-wear designers with their name on the label. I don’t know if Jenna would have even gotten in. She’s really redefined what we think of fashion designers.”

Ms. Lyons would say she had not set out to do any such thing. If anything, she has simply focused on reinventing herself and J. Crew’s offerings — if there’s a difference between the two, and after 22 years she is not sure there is — season after season.

WHILE there is little question that the trials of the last year have vaulted her into that special fashion rank of controversial-but-brilliant talents like Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein or Halston, Ms. Lyons is looking forward to perhaps a wee bit less exposure. Pathologically modest, she waves off comparisons to other designers. If she feels a kinship to anyone, she suggested, it might be Claire McCardell, the midcentury American designer known for simplifying European fashion trends and adapting them pragmatically, cleverly and with her own style for American women.

So yes, there she was at Carnegie Hall, at the Glamour Awards, thanking Ms. Crangi, but she didn’t intend to cause a stir, she said. She just felt it was time to acknowledge her relationship.

And fittingly for someone for whom recognition has come slowly, she is able to look at the tumult of the last year through the lens of experience.

“When I was young and people judged me for things I had no control over, that was really hard, so I’m incredibly open to people doing whatever works for them,” she said. “It’s just as surprising to me as it probably is to everyone else. It certainly is strange to wake up, at 44, and look at the person next to you and think: ‘Oh! This wasn’t what I expected.’ But I don’t think love works that way, and I am O.K. with that.”